Ever since the birth of science fiction, people have been talking about teleportation. But brand-new technology suggests we may have been looking at it the wrong way…
People at PTC are unveiling what they call the “Holodeck,” which involves spatial computing, and it’s, well, impressive.
It’s being used for things like prosthetics and factory design.
But the underlying idea has to do with changing how we think about space.
Essentially, instead of sending a person’s body to a different location, the Holodeck achieves a sort of transportation by bringing the data of a remote space to you. Through rich datasets, it makes these places seem ‘real’ in ways that seemed unthinkable just a few years ago.
The infrastructure to capture the data is simple – a smartphone and a lidar sensor.
But with these simple tools, you can do very complex things!
I was watching the teams perform analysis on factory work, with ergonomic studies, and visualization of human poses with the Holodeck.
You can see how you start to take on the perspective of the space represented by the data overlay.
You can also see how we track ‘spaghetti maps’ – continuous flow lines of motion – to look at how work actually gets performed.
Planners cite a Mercedes-Benz study for a tire alignment, where precision is key. Watching demos, you see the color-coded lines twist and turn, and you can visualize what’s happening, where everything is going, in what I now call “real-space.”
Then you can see that there’s also labeling technology in place, to show you more about components that might be present in that space you’re exploring. So if you have controls, in an industrial setting, suddenly you can manipulate them in the virtual space! That’s a big add.
And of course, no demo of this kind of thing would be complete without showing what NASA could do with this stuff: I’ve also seen the technology measuring craters on the moon. When you have enough monitoring, there’s no “dark side” left. Imagine this on a space rover, and how much we will know, how much we will be able to experience, without launching ourselves into the dark reaches of space!
As engineers explain, the Holodeck is essentially a data hub – it’s a spatial computer and AI utility that’s just in its startup phase.
I think this is something that all of our students should be looking at as we think about top use cases. Teleportation? We’ve long been stumped by the challenges of taking human biology, and transporting it across space. But if space comes to you, and that starts to seem real, what will we need teleportation for?
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